The Indianapolis Colts’ first primitive training camp was 40 years ago

Posted on by Vaseline

The gym was primitive, a tent outside on a huge sheet of plywood with monstrous electric fans blowing hot air mixed with sweat in a cyclone while mosquitoes found fresh meat to suck on. The practice field was bumpy and the two-day workouts were conducted in full pads, under the sultry summer sun of the auto-manufacturing town of Anderson.

There was a commander overseeing everything with a frown on his face, a 5-foot-10, 55-year-old instructor named Frank Kush. He had an intimidating, merciless presence that allowed him to use his piercing blue eyes to drive the giants to do whatever he wanted.

Stalag Kush is what newspaper reporters called the Colts’ training camp in Baltimore the season before, in reference to German prisoners of war. Players joked that they “survived” Kush camp. Fullback Randy McMillan even threatened to have T-shirts printed with the words “We made it through.”

As the team prepared for its first season in Indianapolis a year later, not much had changed. If anything, Kush was tougher than ever, harder than ever. He had more to prove in his third season as head coach of the Colts, following a 7-9 record in 1983 and a strike-shortened 0-8-1 in 1982.

Kush didn’t care much about the amenities his players would have at their first training camp in Indiana. He just wanted a place where he could filter out a good portion of the 150 rookies, free agents and veteran draft picks who had come to chase an NFL dream.

And for five long, miserable weeks, the players washed, rinsed, and repeated the job with sweat, blood, and tears.

“Every day was the same. You wake up like you’re in the movie ‘Groundhog Day,'” said Jon Scott, the Colts’ longtime equipment manager and now the team archivist and historian. “Frank Kush was a tough, hard-working guy. He did random conditioning to make sure everybody could do it.”

Among them were more than 100 huge dudes who raced across the campus of Anderson College for the 1.5-mile endurance test created by Kush, the Colts Invitational.

Pete Ward, the team’s director of operations at the time, remembers walking into his office, 15 feet from the dormitory where he was staying, to find 25 players lined up to make travel arrangements home. They hadn’t made the cut, and Kush had no trouble explaining exactly why.

When the modern-day Colts travel to Grand Park in Westfield on Thursday for the first day of the team’s training camp, they will be, in every way, pampered compared to the training camp of their groundbreaking 1984 predecessors.

“It was a different world back then, a whole different world,” said Ward, now the team’s chief operating officer. “We went from old-time football to today, a whole different level.”

‘We didn’t really have a list of choirboys’

According to Colts owner Jim Irsay, it seems like only yesterday that, in the wee hours of a rainy night in 1984, the team and everything that came with it piled into 14 Mayflower trucks and secretly moved from Baltimore to Indianapolis.

Rick Russell, the president of Mayflower’s relocation department, called it “probably the most famous sports move ever” in an IndyStar article marking the 30th anniversary of the Colts’ move to Indianapolis.

“I can guarantee you this. There’s never been a move like this before and probably never will again,” Irsay, who was the son of team owner Robert Irsay and the 24-year-old general manager in 1984, told IndyStar this week. “And obviously, being here in Indy for 40 years, it brings back so many memories of, you know, just coming here and being at Fall Creek School.”

When the Colts arrived in the city after a 600-mile drive, they disembarked at the elementary school at 4900 Kessler Boulevard East Drive, which would become the team’s headquarters for the next 16 months.

As news of the overnight move spread, the city of Baltimore mourned as Indianapolis was unanimously excited to have an NFL team. But the timing of the team’s arrival was a bit of a mystery. It was almost April, and the Colts had to quickly find a place to hold training camp three months later.

“When we moved, it was so late in the season,” Scott said. “It was the end of March and we were behind on everything, including, ‘Where the heck are we going to have training camp?’”

Ward remembers being assigned as a “training camp man,” getting out of the moving van and going straight to work.

“It was just so incredible,” Irsay said. “There’s almost no way to describe the uniqueness of taking a soccer team to another part of the country and getting ready for training camp in a couple of months.”

Irsay and Ward, along with Colts attorney Michael Chernoff, made their first stop at Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis) to meet with college president Gene Sease. Ward says the college was welcoming and friendly, but it just wasn’t the right fit.

“The facilities there at the time were not ideal for an NFL training camp,” Ward said. “We were failing at other places, too.” Including DePauw and Butler.

Then came the call from “Mr. Anderson,” former Dodgers star Carl Erskine, who had grown up in the city, served on the university’s board of trustees and was his hometown’s biggest advocate. “You really should come see us sometime,” he told Irsay.

Irsay and his three traveled to the university, located 50 miles northeast of Indianapolis, and found the site where the Colts would establish their training camp not only for the next 14 seasons, but for seasons to come.

“Anderson gave us a lot of what we had in Baltimore,” Ward said, “and probably a little bit more.”

That little bit extra was a “big plus” in the form of air-conditioned dormitories, which was a dream for players walking from a sweltering pitch to the steamy, sparsely equipped locker rooms, where fans blew a sultry gust of wind.

“There were also brand new metal lockers at Anderson,” Scott said. “And the dorms had bigger, longer beds for our players. People didn’t realize how big these guys are. How comfortable they were, I don’t know. At least their feet weren’t hanging off the bed.”

Another thing about Anderson that Colts executives liked, Scott said, was that “there wasn’t a whole lot to do in Anderson, not a whole lot to distract the players.” But that was a double-edged sword. Without entertainment, the players would create their own.

“What I didn’t realize until we got there was that (Anderson) was the world headquarters for the Church of God,” Ward said. “And we didn’t exactly have a roster of choir boys.”

‘They have turned their heads a lot’

Among the participants was Chris Hinton, an electric personality with the social skills and zest for life that could make anything fun, even a training camp seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

“I never liked anything about training camp,” Hinton, an offensive tackle and eventual six-time Colts Pro Bowler, told Colts.com. “It wouldn’t have been worth trying. We were only 50 miles from home, but it might as well have been 500.”

Ward didn’t mention any names, but Hinton liked it.

“There was one time when someone’s birthday was being celebrated in the locker room on campus and there were a couple of ladies who came over and provided the entertainment,” Ward said. “That didn’t go over well.”

An article on Colts.com about past training camps tells the story this way: “Players and coaches remember the exotic dancer (Hinton) who once arranged a performance for a coach whose birthday always fell during camp. The performance wasn’t indecent, but it was just not appreciated by university officials.”

Ward describes the relationship between the Christian university and the Colts as “a few bumps in the road every now and then.” Alcohol was not allowed on campus, which was probably the team’s most common violation.

“There were a couple other times where it was a little more serious,” Ward said. “There were a couple of times where I came back from lunch and the president of the college, the dean, and the boot camp liaison were lined up outside my office.”

Ward apologized, downplayed the transgressions and promised the team would do better.

“I know they turned a lot of heads,” Ward said. “I think they appreciated us as a partner, and they appreciated having an NFL team in Anderson.”

After all, this training camp was perfectly timed for Anderson. The camp was a way to breathe life into a city that had been called the unemployment capital of America just two years earlier.

‘Access to the players? Whatever you wanted’

Businesses and stores throughout Anderson, and especially along Indiana 109 near the university campus, proudly displayed Colts banners that summer of 1984, some of which were sold by the city’s Chamber of Commerce.

Harts Hair Cottage put up a billboard with the words “Welcome Colts” in monstrous letters. A Texaco gas station offered a “Tex-a-Colt” deal, a free Colts flag with a full tank of gas. A Burger King not far from the university had not only signs but Colts grills on every table.

“We really enjoyed it,” Tony Roseberry, the restaurant’s general manager, told IndyStar in 1984. “We wanted the people of the city to feel at home.”

Roseberry’s restaurant added an unprecedented 32-ounce drink to the series that fans could take with them to watch the workouts. In just two weeks, sales increased 55% from the year before.

Ward said the fan facilities at Anderson were “spartan” but that didn’t stop fans from coming to watch their new professional football team, even if it meant standing on the hard ground while the sun was shining.

Each Colts training camp practice in 1984 drew an estimated 800 to 1,000 fans, according to the Anderson/Madison County Visitors and Convention Bureau. And those fans were so excited to see, for many of them for the first time, actual NFL players in person.

“It was kind of a novelty for a town like Anderson to have an NFL team there,” Ward said. And those fans could get as close to the players as they wanted.

Forty years ago, there was no real security and players had to walk through a lot where fans parked to get to and from the field. Fans could wait outside the cafeteria to greet the players after a hearty meal.

“The access to the players was whatever you wanted,” Ward said. “If you wanted an autograph, the players would walk right past your car or right past you.”

Although the team was made up of strangers from Baltimore, they felt the love of Anderson, which seemed to be the quintessential friendly Indiana town.

“The city and the people and everything around it, I remember it all too well,” Irsay said. “Everyone was so excited and that excitement pushed us through and helped us through so many obstacles on the way to training camp.”

There’s no doubt that the training camp, forced by time constraints to convene on a whim, was “semi-decent to adequate” at best, Irsay said. “But everyone was so friendly, so helpful, so willing to lend a hand.”

Looking back, there may have been no better place than Anderson College to hold the Colts’ first Indianapolis training camp, except for one thing. Irsay was missing his favorite East Coast delicacy, boiled crab.

And so that first Colts camp in the Midwest took on a coastal flavor, as Irsay flew in boiled crab from Maryland to Anderson. Which made that first camp not so primitive after all.

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbowYou can reach her via email: [email protected].

Avatar for Vaseline
Vaseline https://newspowergreen.biz.id

You May Also Like

More From Author